Reading this was probably one of the most pleasant surprises I’ve had in quite awhile. For you have the creator of Saw, James Wan who created and did the initial story for the book. I’ve never really been interested in the Saw franchise in itself so in looking over this book that did get me curious in what I was getting into. I’m not familiar with the writer being Michael Alan Nelson and the artist Piotr Kowalski and all these unknown quantities turn into me having one surprising comic reading experience. The general story of this comic is Alan Gates has a brain tumor that’s been slowly killing him. Nothing has helped to contain it or cure it so he’s just biding time until his eventual death. So what if instead of your eventual death something completely different happens? That’s where it all takes a turn. It’s turned into the thing that saves his life.
Now if you’ve read much about the comic you pretty much know what you’re getting into just from the cover. I won’t spoil all the story beats for you for there are quite a few surprises of how this all comes to play. Michael Alan Nelson does a great job of relating this character to you. You can sympathize with what Alan is going through and the way it’s all handled isn’t overplayed but just this perfectly human way of handling it. He’s ticked off because he’s losing his memory because of what’s in his brain. Yeah you’d be pretty ticked off too. It goes into the details of what a brain tumor does to you. One of the more realistic ways I’ve seen this explained actually so kudos to James Wan and Michael Alan Nelson for creating this well rounded character.
The art by Piotr Kowalski impressed me. His art is dark yet has this nice clean style to it. It’s different and I like it. It works great for this horror style comic they’re going for. For I think for the story that this book is going for you needed an artist who could express as much humanity at the same time as the aspect of the horror to this series. For I think the surprise of this story for me was the fact that this book screamed this sort of horror comic fairly generic idea and between the art and the story completely blew me away.
I will tell you this and this is coming from someone who doesn’t watch horror movies regularly and hasn’t had an interest in the Saw series this book is definitely worth your time. With a strong storyline that I have no idea how it’s going to play out over the four issue series to good characterization. It’s definitely going to be one book that you should definitely add to your pile. I find myself curious in seeing where this is going to go and when you read this you’ll end up feeling the same way. For with heart and horror all at the same time you have one compelling title.
Review copy provided by Boom! Studios
